by Lars Markull

Open Banking around the world

What will be the biggest impact of PSD2: Increased competition? Pushing the bank-as-a-platform model? Forcing startups and banks to work together? All of them are applicable but in my personal opinion PSD2 can have a much bigger impact: if it is the beginning of a movement to provide access to data that has been historically inaccessible for third parties. PSD2 is focusing on payment accounts in the European Union, but if other countries and/or industries are following, PSD2 is just the beginning of a whole movement.

Especially the geographical expansion of Open Banking is currently in full progress. Recently Australia has been in the news regarding their plan to force banks to provide third party providers access to financial sources (more industries will follow). Apparently, all of this has started already in 2016 as a move to increase the competition of the financial service industry in Australia. In Australia, the four largest banks have a market share of >80% (depending on the metric) and thus are targeted by the new regulation. The banks will have twelve months starting from the commencement date to implement open banking and provide access to transactional data at least until the 1st January 2017. The exact commencement date is not known yet but assuming that many details will only be known by this date, twelve months sounds like a very ambitious time frame. After the implementation of these open banking guidelines, the regulator will check the impact of open banking and report to the Minister for recommendations. (Main Sources: Australian Government, ZDnet, OpenGov Asia).

It will be interesting to see if and how Australia will learn from our PSD2 implementation. The time frame is ambitious, however, this will also provide fast results with room for improvement. Additionally, Australia is not the only country in Asia Pacific currently investigating Open Banking. Many more are doing so as you can see in this graphic from IDC Financial Insights:

It is nice to see that so many countries are following EU and are adopting Open Banking regulations. These countries are clearly not doing it as they got inspired by the EU decision but rather as ways to increase competition and treat consumers better, however, let’s hope that all these countries are learning from the implementation in other countries. It is also interesting to see that banking is often the industry chosen by the regulator (clearly due to generally limited competition) and I am looking forward to see what industries will be next. Consumers will be able to benefit a lot from this.